Understanding Cart Abandonment

Challenge

Helping a leading e-commerce brand understand why people abandon their online shopping carts and what to do about it.

Just about every e-commerce player is trying to address the cart abandonment challenge… and our e-commerce client is no different. Common cart abandonment strategies focus on technical user experience improvements. Our hypothesis was that emotional and psychological drivers play an instrumental role in cart abandonment and can be addressed with interventions. In essence, our e-commerce client needed real human insights they could use to help brands and retailers on their platform reconnect with lost shoppers.

Approach

We took a three layered approach to the problem. We ran a horizon scan to source best practice examples from leading e-commerce players. We then conducted a thorough academic review of existing media and literature to uncover socio-behavioral insights and build a comprehensive synopsis of current cart abandonment knowledge. Then we held a series of conversations with experts across a spectrum of e-commerce functions (e.g., brands, retailers, commerce consultants, social strategists, futurists) to build a playbook of cart abandonment prevention, trigger, and recovery strategies for our client and the brands, merchants and advertisers on their platform.

Impact

In addition to providing much needed depth and clarity to our client’s understanding of shopping cart abandonment and how best to prevent it, the behavior models and high-level guidelines we developed will inform their overall marketing approach.